ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Twenty-seven Kurdish migrants rescued, then detained by the Egyptian Navy while en route to Europe are nervously awaiting deportation to Iran, where they could face execution and imprisonment, a London-based refugee rights group said on Friday.
On October 18, a boat set sail from the western Turkish province of Izmir for Italy, with 57 passengers of Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish and Egyptian nationalities on board. The vessel broke down mid-journey, its stranded passengers waiting for three days before they were rescued by the Egyptian Navy.
After being quarantined for 15 days due to coronavirus measures with insufficient food and water in Matruh Port, 150 kilometres from Alexandria, the migrants were taken to the Iranian and Iraqi embassies in handcuffs to deport them, said Secretary of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) Dashty Jamal, who closely monitors their situation with sources he said he could not share.
Among the 57 migrants were 25 people from the Kurdistan Region. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) repatriated all 25, who arrived in Sulaimani on Friday, Ari Jalal, the head of the Summit Foundation for Refugees and Displaced Affairs told Rudaw's Fuad Rahim.
According to data from Summit, more than 32,000 people from Iraq, most of whom are from the Kurdistan Region, have claimed asylum in Europe this year.
The detained migrants were mostly young men in their teens and early twenties, but among them are three women, and two children aged just 4 and 5 – also handcuffed when taken to the embassy.
Another “27 people are held in a prison in Cairo, where they have separated the women and the children, turned on the air conditioning in this cold weather, and have cut off the water,” IFIR secretary Dashty Jamal told Rudaw English on Friday. The detainees have been forced to sign documents to consent to their deportation to Iran, Jamal told Rudaw English.
The remaining migrants – two Turks, an Egyptian, and two Iranians who had pretended to be Iraqis – were handed over to the Egyptian government, Jamal said, their fate unknown.
Among the detainees is Hiwa*, a 22-year-old from Iranian Kurdistan. Hiwa began working as a kolbar at the age of 15 or 16, his mother told Rudaw English, making the dangerous journey carrying untaxed goods across the mountainous Kurdistan Region-Iran border during his school holidays.
Many are pushed into working as kolbars by mass unemployment, particularly in Iran’s impoverished Kurdish provinces. Dozens of kolbars are either killed or wounded every year by Iranian security forces, and sometimes Turkish security forces.
“His friends were kolbars and were all shot dead at the borders; he didn’t want the same thing happening to him,” said Hiwa’s mother, who wanted to remain unnamed.
While working as a kolbar, Hiwa applied for universities, but he wasn’t admitted due to political reasons, his mother said. A despondent Hiwa then decided to embark on the dangerous voyage to Europe, hoping to eventually bring his mother to live with him, to “have a brighter future just like everyone else.”
His mother was all too aware of the dangers posed by the journey to Europe.
“One day I told him, there is a 90 percent chance you might not make it, and he told me that he'd take that 10 percent as long as he could get out of Iran,” she told Rudaw English by telephone on Friday.
Hiwa’s mother fears the consequences and hardships the deportation of her son and the other young migrants will bring, including possible arrest and sentencing - a fate that befalls Kurds and other ethnic minorities in Iran disproportionately often.
“Iran is a country of execution and dictatorship; they were under a lot of oppression and hardship”, she said. “When you’re a Kurd in Iran, you’re twice as misfortunate.”
Hiwa’s mother believes the KRG could have worked harder to protect her son.
“We were expecting more from the Kurdistan Regional Government, they shouldn’t have separated them and left the rest to the Iranian authorities... I am asking on behalf of all of their parents to help them in any way you can.”
The fiancée of one of the migrants told Rudaw English on Friday of the danger they face upon their return.“They all have problems with the Iranian regime.” She too has been by her detained fiancé of mistreatment at the hands of both the Iranian and Egyptian authorities, saying that their treatment has readied them for a return to the country they wanted to flee.
One man told Rudaw English of a painful call with his detained daughter.
“I got a phone call saying “talk to your daughter”. My daughter talked to me crying, she wasn’t okay,” said the father, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of endangering both himself and his child.
On October 31, long before Friday’s deportation of 25 migrants back to the Kurdistan Region, Jamal wrote a letter to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the UN Refugee Agency, human rights organisations, and a number of European embassies and premiers, demanding a fair and secure decision.
“IFIR demands that the 57 passengers are dealt with as refugees rather than just instantly sent back to their war-torn countries where their lives will be at huge risk especially in Iran where they will be executed,” the letter read.
During their two-week quarantine, the migrant detainees went on a two-day hunger strike to protest their mistreatment, which had included insufficient food and water, IFIR said.
“We get two pieces of bread and a small piece of cheese for 24 hours, the water is shut off and turned on for 15 minutes a day, we don’t have a proper place to sleep… if this goes on for three more days we won’t be able to take it, we’ll have to go back to Iran,” one of the detainees said in a video message submitted to Rudaw English by their relative.
Two more of the Iranian Kurdish detainees who spoke to Rudaw, one from Mariwan and one from Sardasht, asked for immediate action from the international community on their plight.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
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